Applications including video conferencing, video telephony, and other applications that transmit video may process video data. An isochronous stream may be used to carry the video data. The video data may be routed through a network that includes one or more network devices. The network devices may include, for example, switches, routers, network interface cards, and so on. Representing an image may require large amounts of video data. A network device routing the video data may become overwhelmed with the large amount of video data.
Video quality may suffer when the network device is overwhelmed. Also, momentary bursts of traffic may tie up a port in a network device. While tied up, the port is not available to other streams of video data being processed in the network device. Network resources may also need to be protected from being abused by traffic profile violating streams.
A Stream Registration Protocol (SRP) has been developed to provide a reliable network quality of service. Isochronous streams may be provisioned in the network device using the SRP. The isochronous stream is provisioned before the actual data exchange with the network device occurs.
During a stream registration phase, an SRP software layer determines whether the hardware has adequate resources to handle a new data stream. The determination includes summing a data rate of the isochronous streams provisioned for a given port. The summation may then be used as a threshold. The threshold may determine whether incoming isochronous traffic is accepted for a given port. Despite careful calculations in the SRP for configuring bandwidths for each isochronous stream, inherent momentary traffic bursts introduced by the network may still overwhelm a port. The momentary traffic burst may still exceed a Committed Information Rate (CIR) for a given time slot window. When the CIR is exceeded, network data may be affected. For example, video quality may suffer. A more efficient way of processing network data may be desired.